Rocky Mountain Institute worked with the City of Boulder to conduct a thorough analysis of Boulder's demand side management programs. RMI examined 19 residential, commercial, and renewable energy programs using a modified utility cost test approach to determine their full lifetime emissions reductions and the cost/benefit ration for each program. This report summarizes those findings.

In this article published in Foreign Affairs, Amory Lovins describes a U.S. transition from fossil fuels--a blueprint detailed in Reinventing Fire-- that requires pursuing three agendas. First, radical automotive efficiency can make electrification affordable and save fuel in heavy vehicles; and all vehicles can be used more productively. Second, new designs can make buildings and factories several times more efficient than they are now. Third, modernizing the electric system to make it diverse, distributed, and renewable can also make it clean, reliable and secure. Getting the U.S. off fossil fuels would transform its foreign policy, and turbocharge global development. He argues that we don't have to wait for congress to seize these opportunities.

In this essay Amory Lovins discusses the problems of proliferation, oil, and climate. These three formidable problems, though treated as distinct, share common causes and solutions. New energy and climate solutions can strengthen security and prosperity by shifting strategy for the NPT Review Conference. Nuclear power’s astonishing eclipse by cheaper, faster, more climate-protective competitors—if acknowledged and exploited—can simultaneously bolster nonproliferation, energy security, global development, and climate protection, all at a profit. Foreign Policy published a condensed version of this paper, "On Proliferation, Climate, and Oil: Solving for Pattern" (RMI document ID S10-03) in January 2010.

Proliferation, climate change, and oil dependence share both nuclear non-solutions that frustrate U.S. foreign-policy goals and non-nuclear solutions that can achieve them. This synthesis of all three issues shows how reconciling foreign with domestic energy policy can solve these and other big problems at a profit. This essay, first posted 21 January 2010 in Foreign Policy, is expanded in the annotated paper,"Proliferation, Oil, and Climate: Solving for Pattern" (RMI document ID S10-02).

In response the building industry's increased interest in carbon neutrality, this paper discusses alternative approaches to carbon neutrality and introduces a new definition of the term. As an example of the new concept in practice, an institutional building in construction documentation phase in Lake Placid, Florida is examined. The introduced model allows for the assessment of buildings in a way that is arguably more helpful than calculating “net-zero” building operation emissions.

Protecting the climate is not costly but profitable (even if avoided climate change is worth zero), mainly because saving fuel costs less than buying fuel. The two biggest opportunities, both sufficiently fast, are oil and electricity. The US, for example, can eliminate its oil use by the 2040s at an average cost of $15 per barrel (2000$), half by redoubled efficiency and half by alternative supplies, and can save three-fourths of its electricity more cheaply than operating a thermal power station. Integrative design permits this by making big energy savings cheaper than small ones, turning traditionally assumed diminishing returns into empirically observed expanding returns. Such efficiency choices accelerate climate-safe, inexhaustible, and resilient energy supply—notably the ‘‘micropower’’ now delivering about a sixth of the world’s electricity and 90% of its new electricity. These cheap, fast, market-financeable, globally applicable options offer the most effective, yet most underestimated and overlooked, solutions for climate, proliferation, and poverty.

Some nuclear-power advocates claim that wind and solar power can't provide much if any reliable power because they're not "baseload," that they use too much land, that all energy options including new nuclear build are needed to combat climate change, and that nuclear power's economics don't matter because climate change will force governments to dictate energy choices and pay for whatever is necessary. None of these claims can withstand analytic scrutiny.

Book or Book Chapter, 2009http://www.rmi.org/Knowledge-Center/Library/2009-17_AcceleratingCampusClimateInitiatives

Accelerating Campus Climate Initiatives: Breaking Through Barriers is a practical guide for anyone working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at a college or university: sustainability directors, CFOs, presidents, students, faculty, and staff. The book covers five topics: climate action planning, buildings and utilities, renewable energy, transportation, and carbon offsets. Buy the book now.

This semi-technical article, summarizing a detailed and documented technical paper (see "The Nuclear Illusion" (2008)), compares the cost, climate protection potential, reliability, financial risk, market success, deployment speed, and energy contribution of new nuclear power with those of its low- or no-carbon competitors.